The new European System of Accounts (ESA95) has been an important step forward in getting harmonized definitions and accounting rules and more detailed national accounts for the European Union and its Member States. National Accounts provide time series for observing changes in the overall effective tax burden and a coherent framework for matching tax revenues with income flow data and economic aggregates. It is not possible to obtain a good picture of where in the economy the tax burden falls by looking solely at standard classifications of taxes. Therefore a broad classification into three economic functions (i.e. consumption, labour and capital) has been made. National accounts have been used to derive information on the corresponding aggregate bases that could potentially be taxed in the economy, in order to calculate implicit tax rates (ITRs) for consumption, labour and capital. ITRs measure the average effective tax burden on the different types of income or activity in the economy. They do not measure the final incidence of taxes that can be shifted from one activity to another via behavioural effects. It is also evident that these potential tax bases do not measure the actual tax bases as defined in the legislation. In practice it is sometimes not straightforward to link developments in the implicit tax rates to tax policy changes. For the moment a classification of taxes by economic function is only available for the old Member States of EU-15. Such classification leads inevitably to certain simplifications and rather hybrid categories. The exercise is currently complicated by the fact that the tax data are not always recorded in sufficient detail to identify individual taxes and allocate them to the corresponding categories. A key methodological problem for classifying tax revenue across the economic functions is that some taxes relate to multiple sources of economic income or activities. This holds notably for personal income tax (which is typically broadly based), and also for some other taxes (e.g. local business taxes or energy taxes). Estimates from national tax departments have been used to make the relevant allocations of taxes, whenever this was feasible.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Volume (Year): 4(499)(supplement) (2006) Issue (Month): 4(499)(supplement) (June) Pages: 363-374 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF